If you’ve been keeping abreast of the latest electronic spying scandals, you’ll know that the phone calls of Americans are routinely harvested by shadowy “counterterrorism” authorities, and that the big e-net in the cloud is trawling farther and farther through everyone’s lives by the month, week or day.

Spying on this vast a scale has left many with fingers trembling over their devices –- could that blearily-typed “dude, last night was a killer,” end up in a takedown? Could an innocent “let's blow this town” mean face time with the Faceless Forces?

Such things have happened. So it’s all very creepy. And scary. Or, as Al Gore says, “obscenely outrageous.”

But it’s also disappointing.

For centuries the roughish trade of spying used to be a two-way street, which at least gave the spyee the fun of a frisson of fear. But these massive intersections of cables, signals, switchers, leading to silent rooms of machines that sort and re-route streams of data are simply dismal.

Trust me.

While working on a book on the U.S. nuclear program in the late 1980s, I received my mail in blatantly ripped envelopes. The flat of the photographer I worked with was invaded and her files raided in her absence. A watchful neighbour said it was “a well-dressed guy who drove away in a BMW.” Two strikes against a break-in by someone from our ‘hood in suburban Utah.

In Moscow in the 1990s, spies who never came in from the Cold War habitually listened in on phone conversations of foreign journos, allowing us the amusement of spinning stranger-than-fiction stories and the cachet of saying, “if my voice fades suddenly it’s okay, it’s just my tapper.”

When I refused an “invitation” to turn over a tape to a state prosecutor, I came home to find my music tapes scattered on my apartment floor. And at 1 a.m. in a snowstorm I was trailed through Moscow by an unmarked car: it was the only other car on the road.

Fast forward to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad in the early 2000s, where spying was a favoured spectator sport.

Every foreigner’s phone was tapped and every hotel room bugged, to the chagrin of a friend who rashly spent the night with a colleague. Next morning an official summoned her to the appropriately-named Information Ministry: “I regret to tell you,” he said with an avuncular smile, “but it’s for your own good. That man is married.”

Sadly, things have moved on since then. The new Big Data dippers aren’t interested in sorting out our love lives or playing head games head-to-head. They can’t, because they’re machines.

“Nobody is listening to your phone calls,” said President Barack Obama, in response to the wave of media protest.

Nobody!

You betcha.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the U.S., South Asia and the Middle East. And she doesn’t care who knows it.

05/02/2013

Index of most dangerous countries for journalists. (Committee to Protect Journalists)

Nigeria is a new addition to the list of the most dangerous countries in which to be a journalist, joining mainstays such as Pakistan, Somalia and Mexico.

Five journalists in Nigeria have been murdered since 2009. None of the cases have been solved.

“Investigations into these killings are usually carried out with sloppiness, and no real culprits are caught," said Ayode Longe, a senior officer with the Media Rights Agenda, a press freedom group in Nigeria. “That has emboldened others to assault journalists, believing nothing would be done to them."

The global index is released each year by the Committee to Protect Journalists and calculates unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country's population.

The index also found soaring impunity rates in Somalia, Pakistan, and Brazil.

The CPJ said conditions for journalists are improving in Nepal and Russia, "although both nations remain dangerous for the press."

The analysis founds increasing anti-press violence in Somalia, Pakistan, and Brazil, where national leaders are unwilling or unable to address the issue. In Somalia, 23 journalist murders have gone unsolved over the past decade.

The CPJ report highlights the cased of Wali Khan Babar, a journalist with Geo TV in Pakistan who was murdered in 2011.

While several suspects connected to one of the country’s leading political parties, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, are facing trial, the prosecution has been hindered by the murders of five people connected to the investigation, including witnesses and police officers.

In November 2012, an eyewitness was gunned down two days before he was due to give testimony, the CPJ said.

Iraq is said to be the most dangerous country in which to be a journalist. Over the past 10 years, there have been 93 unsolved killings of journalists in the country of 33 million. Somalia was ranked No. 2, followed by the Philippines, where 55 journalists have been murdered without any convictions in the country of 94 million.

Rick Westhead is a foreign
affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South
Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on
international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

04/30/2013

If there was a major chemical weapon attack on a Syrian town or city how quickly, if at all, would the world hear about it?

With access to Syria heavily restricted for journalists, particularly in areas out of rebel control, it may be very difficult for independent news organizations and relief agencies to bear witness and record for history such a massacre.

Syrians are heroically recording footage of casualties of their war and there are clips circulating on YouTube which clearly show civilians suffering from some sort of chemical: foaming mouths, unfocused eyes, rasping breath. But what exactly it all adds up to no one is yet certain.

The U.S., Britain, France and Israel have said they have some evidence of chemical weapon attacks. The Americans mentioned the nerve agent sarin. The UN is waiting for the Syrian regime to give permission to its team of investigators to enter the country so it can conduct its own field research.

It is worth looking back to how the world found out about the Halabja massacre, which marked its 25th anniversary last month. Iran played a big part although its reasons were probably not all altruistic.

On March 16 1988, approximately 5,000 ethnic Kurds in the northeastern town of Halabja were killed by Saddam Hussein when fighter planes dropped a cocktail of nerve gases sarin, tabun and VX plus the chemical agent mustard gas.

Saddam was at war with Iran. With the help of Kurdish rebels, the town had fallen into Iranian hands.

The first reports of the horrors emerged within a couple of days in Iran when the official news agency accused the Iraqis of killing 5,000 Kurds using poison gas. The Iranian interior minister invited the head of the UN High Commission for Refugees to see the victims.

Within a week, the first independent journalists arrived to document the carnage – flown in by an Iranian army helicopter.

Reuters reported: “Bodies lay on the streets, and others in the rubble of smashed buildings. Others sprawled half out of cars. Dead women clutched lifeless children.”

Survivors told journalists the chemicals smelled like apples or onions. The BBC broadcast footage shot by an amateur Iranian cameraman of clouds of gas emerging from the town. Thirty victims were flown to London, Geneva, Frankfurt and New York for medical treatment, the nature of the injuries confirmed by medical professionals. The Iranian authorities also gave journalists access to victims in Tehran who were suffering from peeling, raw skin, struggling to breathe.

Iraq denied all the accusations.

The United States, which was backing Iraq in its war with Iran, at the time said Iran was partly to blame for the massacre.

As a final note, observers of the UN Security Council’s vacillating role in the Syrian civil war may be interested to hear of its lukewarm condemnation of Halabja.

Halabja was the worst chemical attack since World War I, but a UN security resolution 1988 simply condemned the “continued use of chemical weapons in the conflict between the Islamic Republic of Iran and Iraq,” and called on "both sides to refrain from the future use of chemical weapons."

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

04/29/2013

Abrams tank in Lima, Ohio. Lawmakers have devoted nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money over the past two years to build improved versions. Military officials say they have plenty of them. (AP Photo/General Dynamics Land System)

Remember that gotcha moment in the 2012 U.S. election campaign?

It was during the final presidential debate, when Republican candidate Mitt Romney charged that under President Barack Obama’s watch, the U.S. navy is “smaller than at any time since 1917.”

“Well, Governor,” retorted Obama, “we also have fewer horses and bayonets … we have these things called aircraft carriers.” Cue the laugh track.

Now history seems to be repeating itself as farce, but without the laughs.

Instead of horses and bayonets, the army is being offered $436 million in taxpayer’s dollars for some reconditioned Abrams tanks. And this at a time when the fiscally challenged U.S. has left Iraq, is exiting Afghanistan and has no appetite for a ground war anywhere we know of.

Even the prospect of chemical weapons in Syria hasn’t set the 2,400 massive armored machines the army still possesses lumbering over the desert.

In fact, it’s saying “tanks, no thanks.”

But curiously, the fiercely cost-conscious Congress is insisting, in rare bipartisan accord.

“If we had our choice, we would use that money in a different way,” army chief of staff Gen. Ray Odierno told AP -- aware that the military was under Congressional orders to cut about half a billion dollars (a few paltry million more than the tank funds) from its budget over the next decade.

The bottom line?

The defence plants are deeply embedded in the shaky economies of Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states that host some 560 contractors for the Abrams program, and would feel painful shocks in their communities if the program shut down. While corporations are offshoring their production lines and the major infrastructure projects Obama is pushing may not materialize, the military is still the backbone of the economy.

The U.S. spends more on defense than anything else except Social Security and its 2014 estimates show a projected $618 billion for defense spending -- topping $524 billion for Medicare.

“If there were no need for defense spending,” says analyst Kimberly Amadeo, “the budget deficit would be just $126 billion instead of $744 billion.”

Meanwhile, a new report from the Congressional Research Service says, “only a small proportion of U.S. workers is now employed in factories, as manufacturers have shifted low-value, labour-intensive production, such as apparel and shoe manufacturing, to other countries.” They warn of the possibility of more “hollowing out” to come.

The tanks may not end up on America’s foreign battlefields, but they’re already in the fight at home.

Olivia Ward has covered the 2008 and 2012 U.S. elections, and has written about conflict, human rights and politics from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

It was probably going to be a wild goose chase, we knew, as we set out at the crack of dawn 10 years ago this morning.

But gas in Baghdad was then barely a penny a litre. And the faint whiff of a whopper beckoned four hours south. Nothing burned, nothing gained.

A cloudless sky was forming as we wheeled away from the Palestine Hotel. Moments later, we were struck by the astonishing sight of one of the kindest souls I've ever met -- American human-rights activist Marla Ruzicka jogging -- jogging! -- all alone on the banks of the Tigris.

But that was Baghdad, circa late April 2003. Saddam was gone, the Green Zone didn't yet exist. The landlines were toast, wiped out by America's Shock And Awe aerial bombardment, but Iraq's first makeshift cellular network was still just an idea. Our biggest worry was finding enough electricity to keep our laptops and satphones running.

It was the fragile calm between violent storms. Iraqis were numb with the enormity of regime change. There was room for reporters to roam, with a reasonable expectation of safety.

It wouldn't last. Exactly two years later, as a festering insurgency intensfied, Ruzicka died in a tragic bomb blast near the Baghdad airport. But on this morning she could jog with impunity, perhaps the first woman ever to do so, wearing short shorts, on Iraqi soil. She flashed us a knowing smile and thumbs up.

Still, Uday, our Sunni Arab driver, was nervous, refusing to speed south at anything less than 150 kms/hour. Ameer, our Shiite translator, and British reporter Inigo Gilmore, my safety-in-numbers travel companion, hung on tight as we made the four-hour journey in two and change.

When we got to the hospital in Nasiriya, Inigo and I split up, fanning out to find the Iraqi doctors and nurses who tended to Pte. Jessica Lynch on our own. Get every account, one by one, individually. Then regroup and compare notes in search of telltale inconsistencies.

We were stunned, by the end of the process, to discover the notes matched perfectly. Three Iraqi doctors, two nurses, one hospital administrator and other locals, one after another, all seamlessly debunking in granular detail the biggest Pentagon myth of the war in Iraq.

Four days later, CNN's Aaron Brown placed us in the klieg lights for a live satellite broadcast to set the distorted record straight.

We all get things wrong. Sometimes badly wrong. But the hardest, most sobering lesson I draw from the Lynch debacle is that even when you get it right, myth sometimes myth wins.

Jessica Lynch has done her part, in the ensuing years, to set the record straight. But war requires enemies, armies require heros. And, as she noted this month, if a frightening number of Americans continue to this day to believe the wildly inflated, Hollywood version of Lynch's rescue, "that's on them."

Mitch Potter is the Star's Washington Bureau Chief, his third foreign posting after previous assignments to London and Jerusalem. Potter led the Toronto Star’s coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he won a 2006 National Newspaper Award for his reportage. His dispatches include datelines from 33 countries since 2000. Follow him on Twitter: @MPwrites

You may remember him as the one who told the CIA that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – and that it was linked with deadly Al Qaeda groups that plotted to destroy the U.S.

In London, Chalabi’s Knightsbridge office (handy to Harrod’s) was busily dispensing such vital information to the British government and media. It represented the Iraqi National Congress, a loose coalition of Shiite Muslim, Kurdish and royalist exiles hoping to garner Western support to topple Saddam Hussein and catapult them to power.

When I met with their local point man, behind an unmarked door, he was eager to tell me of a convoluted plot involving Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta – whose life I’d researched in Germany. Atta, he said, in ominous tones, had met with an Iraqi agent in the Czech Republic.

“We’re sure that Mohamed Atta, who was one of the main planners of the U.S. attacks, met (Iraqi) Col. Muhammed Khalil al-Ani in Prague,” he said. “Al-Ani is one of the most highly skilled intelligence officers, and his special expertise is terrorism and killing.”

Amazing detective work!

It was especially amazing because Saddam – who used savage methods to crush religious extremism in Iraq, and terminated enemies of his Ba’ath Party with extreme prejudice -- had never been spotted under the covers with the most violent proponents of radical Islam.

The CIA had doubts too. But in spite of internal grousing, the INC allegations became Washington’s official position, and eventually the casus belli that the U.S. Bush administration needed to launch an invasion of Iraq. The rest is history – a scorched chapter for more than 100,000 Iraqis who died since 2003, and at least four million others who were forced to flee their homes. Some who fled to Syria have now been driven back by the murderous conflict there.

Flash forward to Canada, 2013, where the RCMP announced that an alleged “Al Qaeda-supported plot” to blow up a VIA Rail passenger train had ties to Iran. The detective work, we were told, was assisted by the FBI and Washington's Department of Homeland Security.

But isn’t Iran the place where “apostates” who deviate from Shiite Islam (such as the ultra-Sunni Salafists of Al Qaeda) harshly punished? And which has one of the highest numbers of political prisoners in the world, including two Canadians sentenced to death? Thousands of student protesters have been rounded up, jailed and tortured, opposition leaders put under house arrest and even relatives of suspected dissidents harassed, blackmailed and detained. Ordinary Sunnis have also been seized, their mosques and holy books destroyed.

But like Iraq, Iran is on the political radar of Washington’s far right, which sees a military strike as the answer to its prayers for halting Tehran's ongoing nuclear ambitions. Yet President Barack Obama has not been convinced to fire up the war planes.

So far talk of an Iranian state-sponsored plot against Canada by way of AQ has been dialed back to zero, and perhaps that is where it will stay. Iran, naturally, denies any links with the alleged terrorists and the train plot. But the conjunction of “Iran” and “terrorist” is catnip to the hungry (or agenda driven) denizens of cyberspace. Viral conspiracy theories will proliferate beyond our borders.

And Ahmed Chalabi? By all accounts he’s very rich. But he has given up his ambition to rule Iraq.

Olivia Ward was European bureau chief based in London from 1997-2002. She has covered conflict, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

04/11/2013

A U.S. soldier watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad on April 9, 2003. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevi)

Ten years ago this week a group of Iraqis –- with a crane handily supplied by the U.S. marines –- lassoed a statue of Saddam Hussein in the middle of a Baghdad square and toppled it to the ground: cheers followed in Washington -- and years of tears in Iraq.

The tragi-comic back story of the battle with Saddam’s statue was told in the New Yorker by journalist Peter Maass, who watched as Iraqis chipped away with a sledgehammer at the statue’s base, a symbolic act that mirrored the Bush administration’s bungled attempt at a quick, clean break from the dictator’s brutal regime.

A series of fumbles with American and Iraqi flags ensued, until the marine cavalry saved the day. It supplied the “iconic moment” of victory the TV cameras were hungry for, in spite of protests from some journos who were eager to tell the inconvenient truth, that the war was only beginning. Those who dissented were rewritten out of “history.”

“Very few Iraqis were there,” Maass wrote. “You can also see, from photographs as well as video, that much of the crowd was made up of journalists and marines.” Nevertheless, the event neatly substituted for reality. And it was a great leap forward for the statue-toppling events that have now become de rigeur when dictators tumble.

In 2011, a sculptured golden fist that symbolized Moammar Gadhafi crushing a U.S. fighter plane was smashed by rebels, along with a life-size statue of the Libyan strongman. But fewer hacks were there to snap the moment. Statues of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak were smashed with even less fanfare when the Tahrir Square protesters won the day.

Last month an amateur video showed opposition groups celebrating the destruction of a statue of Bashar Assad’s equally ruthless father, Hafez, in a newly-taken town.

But the statue-smashing tradition goes back much farther, to the ancient world, when newer conquerors would raze and smash the symbols of older ones.

But they lacked the technology and propaganda machines of later eras. In the 19th century, German-born artist Johannes Oertel painted a heroic picture of American patriots pulling down a statue of British king George III in Manhattan in 1776 – but eyewitness accounts contradicted his portrait of cheering native people, elegantly dressed women and children looking on. Rather, they said, it was a rag-tag mob.

Fast forward to the Soviet Union in 1991, when Moscow had its own stage-managed “iconic moment” to show the world that communism had collapsed.

Nikolai Amelin, a 28-year-old street sweeper with a buff body and blond, chiseled features, was plucked from the crowd by a PR-smart aide of President Boris Yeltsin and asked to put a rope around the the massive statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky – the prime enforcer of Joseph Stalin’s terror. The crane Amelin was riding ripped the statue from its base. Overnight, he became the surprised, but triumphant, face of the New Russia.

“It was a decisive moment and it felt like a fantasy,” he told me a decade later, from his sleek central Moscow flat. Now a much-in-demand model, he commanded a wage that few Muscovites could dream of. But at the dawn of the plutocratic Putin era, his old revolutionary spirit was still simmering. He joined a protest movement against developers who were forcing the poorest market vendors from their patches of pavement.

“There are two parallel lives in Russia,” he said bitterly. “The life of the state and the life of the people. They have no meeting point.”

And Dzerzhinsky?

The 15 tonne statue that once loomed over the KGB’s sinister Lubyanka Square is resting in Moscow’s retirement home for old Soviet artifacts, outside the Central House of Artists. Last year the Moscow authorities announced it would be restored to its old glory – and awarded the title of an “object of cultural heritage.”

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002. She has reported on conflicts, politics and human rights there and in the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

03/20/2013

President George W. Bush meets with
crew members on the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003. From the deck of the carrier, Bush announced that
all major combat in Iraq had ended. (Kevin
Lamarque/Reuters)

When I’m asked about the lowest points in my dozen years in and out of war zones I think of Iraq. And all the more on the 10th anniversary of its invasion by U.S. forces.

But what comes to mind is not a battlefield.

It was on the eve of the war, in an Iraqi factory where the heat was so intense you felt you would explode, like a bag of popcorn in a microwave oven. Outside, it was 40C. Inside, there were, mercifully, no barometers. They might have melted down in the thick, chemical-laden air that blasted from the open furnaces.

On this Hades-like landscape, emaciated stick-men toiled up and down ladders to a metal platform that must have been reserved for those sentenced to the nadir of eternal torment. The heat was vicious, palpable, a weapon of mass destruction.

Ironically, that was what I was there to observe.

Shortly before my impromptu visit, the New York Times had pointed to this industrial plant on the outskirts of Baghdad as a weapons of mass destruction site. The U.S. Congress later gave President George W. Bush authority to wage war on Iraq, with or without UN support.

In the Iraqi plant, I broke the news to workers who had interrupted their infernal toil to gawk at a handful of Western reporters, hastily loaded onto a bus by increasingly desperate Iraqi officials hoping --futilely -- to head off the inevitable attack with favourable publicity.

“I make moulds for metal here,” said technician Kais Hamid, through the sweat that dripped from his eyebrows. But if the all-powerful U.S. decided it was nuclear bombs…well so be it. Insha’Allah. “What can we do? We will die,” he said, shuffling back to the catwalk.

Hamid and his fellow workers may well be dead now, long buried under the ruins of the machinery plant. Part of the anonymous (to the West) casualty list of more than 100,000 -- some say many times that number – of Iraqis who perished in the bombing and near civil war that followed.

But I also wonder about so many others I knew in Iraq in the days before the black crosses of destruction were marked on their doors. More than 4 million fled their homes, displaced or huddling outside the borders. A semblance of normality has returned now, but only for the survivors. And only if normality means keeping constant watch for gunmen and bombers.

One who fled was my friend and driver Tariq al Samarai, who escaped with his children and grandchildren to Jordan during the war, after a lifetime of long work hours, to live as a dependent among relatives.

But what became of Sami, the plump, ever-jolly waiter at the cheap and cheerful Bahu café, who joked, “tomorrow we diet,” as the invasion loomed?

Souad al-Azzawi, the dean of Baghdad University’s engineering college, survived, but lost 50 friends, 22 relatives, and experienced the kidnapping of 15 people close to her. The stylish woman who recruited a team of aspiring female engineers flourished in the days when Iraq was a leader in education and received the UN’s highest score of all Arab states for the empowerment of women. Now, she calls the invasion “a disaster that will never be sufficiently documented with numbers or words.”

In the first violent years following the war, women were driven back into their homes by rapes, murders and kidnappings. “We want to be big women,” 17-year-old Noor Imad had told me wistfully, a few months from her high school graduation. “We want to be free, we want to be ourselves. We want everything. Do you think, for us, that is wrong?”

Nor do I know what became of Iraqi intellectuals like Adil Kadahum Jawad, who wrote his plays with a scratchy pen, sitting on a rickety wooden chair in a hole-in-the-wall bookstore on Mutanabi Street. The nearby book market was later bombed by militants, along with the writers’ café.

The violence didn’t spare Iraq’s poorest and least educated, who were caught in the bombing and the crossfire.

Like four-year-old Walid and his 13-year-old brother Aqeel, squatting in the dust of the metal shop where they hammered out shiny steel dog leads, safety chains for fences and sturdy cables for towing Baghdad’s crumbling cars. At dawn they trekked across Baghdad to earn a few near-worthless “Saddam dollars” to help feed their destitute family.

And 12-year-old Kauthar Abed Jabar, living on a hardscrabble desert farm near the Kuwait border with her illiterate widowed mother. She, at least, was well prepared for what was to come. “I have no dreams,” she told me. “The future is nothing for me.”

And what future is there now? The brutal and despicable Saddam is gone. But Iraqis are still living with the consequences of his violent, appallingly planned removal. And the children of his reign have grown up in a harsh school of life, which produces hard graduates.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights as a correspondent and bureau chief from the former Soviet Union to the Balkans, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and South Asia. She has won both national and international awards and collaborated on two Emmy-winning films based on her work, as well as two on Iraq.

Manning
is the 25-year-old soldier who pleaded guilty Feb. 28 to providing
classified government documents to WikiLeaks - a crime that could put
him behind bars for 20 years. The most well-known leak was of U.S. soldiers celebrating airborne killings in Baghdad, which claimed the lives of civilians, including Reuters' photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and 40-year-old driver Saeed Chmagh.

He has been heralded by some as our generation's Daniel Ellsberg, who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers concerning the Vietnam War. Ellsberg said as much in a Huffington Post column last week praising Manning. "I believe Bradley Manning is the personification of the word whistleblower," he wrote.

The case continues as Manning still faces a June trial for the crime of
"aiding the enemy," and, he faces a life sentence if convicted.

Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald wrote recently about the lack of media coverage, noting that the secrecy surrounding the case prohibits even transcripts being released.

NPR's "On The Media" also explored why there has been so little coverage in an interesting discussion with Arun Rath, who reports for PBS Frontline. Rath says if it weren't for the tenacity of three independent journalists - Alexa O'Brien, Kevin Gosztola and Adam Klasfeld - who have covered the pre-trial hearings at Ft. Meade, Md. there would be even less known about the case. The three are admittedly sympathetic to Manning and therefore the coverage reads more as columns, but as O'Brien notes, she also wears the hat of court reporter, writing transcripts since the U.S. government refuses. Rath addresses this with On The Media host Brooke Gladstone:

ARUN RATH: Well, like you said, they don’t pretend
to be objective at all. These are people that do believe Bradley Manning
is a hero and come from that perspective. But here’s – here’s Alexa’s
response to that.

ALEXA O’BRIEN: I’ve thought about it quite a bit
because this question oftentimes comes up, you know, with the sort of
pejorative-ness of being an independent journalist. And my response is
there's nothing more objective than a transcript.

Award-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras (also on the FPF board) and Jenny Perlin have turned the recording into a 5-minute film (below), which has so far garnered more than 200,000 YouTube hits.

"For me, it's all a big mess," Manning is heard telling the military court in explaining his reaction when he first saw the Baghdad video, "and I'm left wondering what these things mean, and how it all fits together."

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the Iraqi war. The Star's Julian Sher was sent to Baghdad in 2007 on assignment for the New York Times and the CBC, just as the Al Qaeda-inspired
insurgency against the Americans and the civil war between Sunnis and Shias was
at its worst.

He brings us this report on the anniversary's significance and what in means for Iraq's people:

When I first met Dr. Haider Ali in war-torn
Baghdad in the spring of 2007, he told me he wept for his country.

“I always cry,” he said as we sat on a
downtown rooftop -- the intermittent sounds of bombs and gunfire below us, the
American helicopters constantly swarming above us.

“I see that all these
sufferings, all this blood that has been shed, all the victims," he said.

Five years later, I caught up with Dr. Ali
via Skype. And while nowadays he has a good job, a beautiful house and young
family, he worries that once again his country might plummet into a spiral
of religious fanaticism and violence.

Tuesday , March 19 marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the ill-fated American invasion of Iraq to
topple the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

Ali at the time told me about the “state
of hopelessness” in which he lived: the targeted assassinations of doctors,
the booby-trapped heads of almost-dead civilians wired to explode and the killing of anyone
who came to save them. The ethnic cleansing of neighbourhoods.

A secular Shia who hated religious extremism
on both sides, Ali said he wanted to flee his disintegrating homeland, perhaps
to Canada.

But then things began to change dramatically.

Not so much because of the much-vaunted
“surge” of American troops in 2007 but because of the creation of “Awakening
Councils” – in essence, the successful attempt by the U.S. military to pay young
Sunni men to fight Al Qaeda instead of Americans.

“They paid them to change sides and there
was more than a 90 per cent improvement,” Ali says. “Everything ended – we didn’t
hear bombings or bullets for a long time. I changed my mind about leaving the
country.”

He finished his studies and got a
well-paying job as a neurologist at the Neurosurgical Teaching Hospital
of Baghdad. He married a fellow doctor and they started a
family.

Today they live with their two young
children in an upscale neighbourhood in the city. They make enough money to buy
a new car every year and Ali tours the world attending international medical
conferences.

“It was a real exciting journey for
me during all this time,” he says. “I lived all the last five years in Baghdad and
witnessed all the ups and downs of everyday life here.”

I ask him if he feels the American invasion
and the bloody years that followed were worth it.

“Each Iraqi has a different view of this
question,” he begins slowly, acknowledging that many who lost loved ones and
family might disagree with him.

“After all that happened, we have a real
democracy. For myself, yes it was worth it,” he says. “I don’t want to look
naïve: They came here to serve their best interests. My best interests weren’t
their priority. But we both benefited from the fall of the regime.”

Carefully, he sums up his feelings this way:
“I feel grateful for the Americans that they toppled Saddam Hussein. But I also
feel angry because of the bad blunders that they committed -- mistakes in ruling
the country and treating the people. They could have made a much better
Iraq.”

And now that much better Iraq is once again
teetering on the edge.

In recent months, new signs of
fighting – and fear – have returned to haunt Ali and his country.

Sectarian struggles have escalated between Sunni and Shia
political leaders. Tariq al-Hashemi, a dapper, well-spoken man who I met when he
was the highest-ranking Sunni at Iraq’s vice president, has fled the country
to avoid arrest and the death penalty for what he says are murder charges trumped up by the Shia-dominated government.

Amnesty International last week
reported that while many Iraqis enjoy greater
freedom after Saddam’s fall, the country is still trapped in a “grim cycle of
human rights abuses, including attacks on civilians, torture of detainees and
unfair trials.”

Ali says there are signs Al Qaeda is
returning. “They were brazen enough to make some ugly appearances,” he
says.

He watched YouTube videos and Iraqi TV
reports that showed demonstrations of several thousand people marching in the
city of Fallujah and other towns in Anbar province, the nexus of some of the
worst fighting during the Iraq war.

“They were chanting their fearful chants,”
says the doctor, “threatening to cut off heads and slit throats just like they
used to.”

So now, five years after we sat on that
rooftop amidst the bombs and bloodshed, he once again ponders fleeing his
country if this wave of violence continues to escalate.

“I am scared for my kids,” Ali explains. “I’m afraid if everything went wrong, I don’t want them to go through the same
miserable conditions we went through.”

So far his
neighbourhood and indeed most of Baghdad remain quiet. But the doctor recalls
how one of his friends who lives in a Shia neighbourhood was told by one
militant that “the Baghdad battle is coming closer.”

‘I got the
goosebumps when I heard that,” says Ali. “Are we heading back to the
nightmare?”

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